


if I stepped out of my body

by leiascully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-04
Updated: 2010-11-04
Packaged: 2017-10-13 12:33:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/137379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mulder without Scully lacked context.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if I stepped out of my body

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: S7  
> A/N: From the one line that's been in my journal on a page by itself for years now. The title is from the James Wright poem "A Blessing". The human credential bit is from a story David Duchovny heard at a party and talked about in one of the specials.  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this and no infringement is intended.

Mulder without Scully lacked context.

He existed merely when she wasn't around, the half-life he'd known before her. He was a shade; he'd been one since the night the light froze him in place, in and out of mind, grief blurring his edges.

He played his pickup games of basketball: at least with the nubby rubber ball slapping into his hand and the clatter and squawk of his shoes on the floor, he felt alive. It reminded him of the days on the sandlot, the perfume of the breeze, the sight of Sam's braids flopping against her shoulders, his own hair falling in his eyes, damp with sweat. That was the last summer he had substance in the world, the last summer his parents looked at him and not through him.

His schooling was a quest: for recognition, for dimension. He entombed himself in articles and papers and files as if it were a ritual burial. He didn't have a thousand clay warriors to serve him, but he had a legion of perfectly sharpened pencils with which to reveal the world's dark secrets and bring them into the light of truth. They weren't enough. None of it was enough. He was an apparition, a ghoul, a joke, even after his blazing success at Quantico. Spooky Mulder, in name and in truth.

His good works were not enough: he was untouched by grace. He was no more than the shape described by his bones, barely three-dimensional, slipping through the Bureau's cracks accidentally on purpose until he found his lair, shoving out the copy machines and making a space for himself, or what was left of him. He built an altar to worship the shreds of hope in the void, the preternatural happenings so improbable as to approach, through a glass darkly, miracles.

And then They sent her in, in her ugly shoes and her poorly-cut suits that made her look frumpy when really under those glasses was a mind as keen as the obsidian sacrificial knife he had seen in some homicidal pagan's file. She sliced truth from lies as neatly as she dissected her cadavers. Scully with her hair as bright as her temper, though she kept both under wraps, and with her special attraction for mutants and madmen. Perhaps it was the whiff of sanity about her, of normalcy, of someone who could walk into a room and not feel ill at ease. She strode along next to him as if she didn't give a damn that he was Spooky Mulder and she didn't give a damn if anyone else thought he was, either, and if they did, then they knew exactly what she thought of them.

Once, at somebody's engagement party back at Oxford, when the world was empty but gleamed around the edges, he had heard the loving fiancé call his future wife his human credential, the reason he could live in society. At the time he had put his arm around Phoebe, who had stiffened slightly and flashed her beautiful smile at the room.

Scully was his human credential now. She translated the arcane transmissions of his unearthly mind into language that others could understand. She told their stories in language people could understand. She gave him legitimacy. She shaded him in, so that the world was full of color again. He was three-dimensional when she was around; people looked up when he walked past, made small talk over the bullpen coffee pot once in a while. Even when they were in the doghouse, they were there together. He loved to see her chafing at the bit, ready to get back into the field, to fold herself into another Ford Taurus and wake up in another half-seedy motel all for the joy of the chase, for the righteousness of it. She made him believe he could see red and green, his face reflected in the shiny paper as he wrapped a trinket and his heart together at Christmas.

He yearned for her when she wasn't around. He turned to talk to her. He held the door to his apartment forgetting that she wasn't at his elbow. She tried to leave. He tried to leave. They pulled each other back. He startled himself out of sleep speaking to her or throwing an arm over what his somnambulist mind thought should be the shape of her body. Her longing for a child left him empty inside too, aching for lost chances and wishing that this once, her beloved science could solve it all.

It was too much. The center could not hold.

Well then: he had substance enough for this one last lost-and-found hope.

He shifted from foot to foot in front of her door and pressed the button.


End file.
